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Right, but years after it was an open secret that he was abusive.
You see my point. You're correct to be skeptical. But the idea that something leaking thwarts the thing just isn't true; did Weinstein stop abusing women once it was clear other people had learned about it? No, he was convicted for things that happened years and years later! Similarly, if there's any truth at all to the UFO thing, the conspiracy has been ticking along despite being "leaked" in the 1940s.
I don't think they have gone down.
The idea that cameras and other technology could verify them is mostly nonsense anyway; pictures and (accounts of) radar returns of "UFOs" have been public for years and it's not some slam-dunk that persuades people; believers will believe them even when they are fake and skeptics will doubt them even if they aren't. Step outside and take a picture of an airliner at cruising altitude with your cell phone. What's that tell you if you don't already know it's an airliner? Next to nothing, and setting up a radar in your back yard to get a skin return doesn't tell you much more unless you have NTCR.
Of course in real life most people have better things to do than e.g. sort through old photographic plates looking for bright spots and thus it's pretty much only people who go looking for UFOs who find them, which rather taints the credibility of the whole affair.
Any conspiracy that's been verified is "evidence against a successful conspiracy" inasmuch as people are aware of it and don't really dispute it. But a successful conspiracy is one that accomplishes its goals; once that happens, it often doesn't actually matter if people are aware of it (hence why we learn new things about World War Two and the Cold War every year.)
But at the same time no conspiracy by definition is secret, because by definition at least two people must know. This is a neat little trick you can use to argue that no conspiracy is really a conspiracy, because (obviously) inadequate steps were taken to keep it secret. But obviously if the conspiracy is illegal it's no defense that you didn't try to keep it a secret. Similarly, I would argue that "secrecy" has various levels, and that simply because something is not secret to everyone or even to non-members of the conspiracy does not render something not a conspiracy.
For instance, look at the famous example of how the Soviet Union was able to deduce that the US was working on an atomic weapon (because, as I understand it, the American scientific literature on the topic dried up). Just because the Soviets were able to figure it out does not mean that there was not an attempt to keep it secret. Furthermore, it was successfully kept secret from the public. Finally, it's noteworthy that the effort was detected precisely because of the conspiracy to keep it secret.
Thus there was a conspiracy to cover up information and it succeeded, albeit imperfectly. The fact that it was not perfect does not mean that there is a conspiracy.
It very much can be intentional; there's a reason "black money" organizations exist (and that's on the legal side of things.)
I think it's helpful to step back and ask yourself if knowing the information would make a material difference. For instance, PR firms are real, and businesses hire them, and sometimes PR firms even publicize which businesses they work with or vice versa. There's no secret there. Nevertheless, newspapers do not disclose that they've been assisted by a PR firm on a story. Why not? Would knowing they have been materially change the way you read the article?
Similarly with ghostwriters. If you've read an op-ed (not a column, but an op-ed) in a newspaper, there's a good chance it was ghostwritten, and this fact is also public. But this is not disclosed. Why not? Would knowing who wrote it materially change the way you read the op-ed?
(Check out Paul Graham's "The Submarine" if you haven't already, it highlights a lot of what I am trying to gesture at.)
So it is that when you open up a newspaper, the entire thing is riddled with little falsehoods or lies of omission that create a false impression, and are the result of not one grand unified conspiracy but dozens of little trivial ones. And as I said, not much different in kind than you adhering to your corporate NDA, or not telling a friend that you're regifting their present, or winking at a subordinate's smoke break, or what have you - but vastly different in ambition because the goal of these little conspiracies is to change the world in which you and I live. And those are relatively mundane, but the same mechanisms that can obscure these little mundane conspiracies can also serve to conceal the CIA recovering a secret Soviet submarine, or USAID trying to undermine the Cuban government by creating a Twitter clone. Tor (which was made by the US Naval Research Laboratory, by the way) conceals the online activity of the petty drug purchaser and the U.S. intelligence operative alike.
You're going to feel like my comparison of PR firms to the Grand Illuminati Council of Lizardfolk is absurd, that the former doesn't meet the definition of conspiracy theory. But I'm trying to tell you that the latter is a weakman that trains your mind to dismiss real conspiracies. The voice in your head that says "that's trivial to bypass if one looks closely" is the same voice that tells you not to look closely.
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